The Breadwinner (10 page)

Parvana struggled to remember her map of the world. “I'm not sure you can get to France by boat.”

“Sure I can. I've got it all figured out. I'll tell a group of nomads that I'm an orphan, and I'll travel with them into Pakistan. My father told me they go back and forth with the seasons, looking for grass for their sheep. In Pakistan, I head down to the Arabian Sea, get on a boat, and go to France!” She spoke as if nothing could be more simple. “The first boat I get on might not go directly to France, but at least I'll get away from here. Everything will be easy once I get away from here.”

“You'll go by yourself!” Parvana couldn't imagine undertaking such a journey on her own.

“Who will notice one little orphan boy?”
Shauzia replied. “No one will pay any attention to me. I just hope I haven't left it too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm starting to grow.” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “My shape is changing. If it changes too much, I'll turn back into a girl, and then I'll be stuck here. You don't think I'll grow too fast, do you? Maybe I should leave before the spring. I don't want things to pop out of me all of a sudden.”

Parvana did not want Shauzia to leave, but she tried to be honest with her friend. “I can't remember how it happened with Nooria. Mostly, I watched her hair grow. But I don't think growing happens all of a sudden. I'd say you have time.”

Shauzia started to kick the building again. Then she stood up so she wouldn't be tempted. “That's what I'm counting on.”

“You'll leave your family? How will they eat?”

“I can't help that!” Shauzia's voice rose and caught, as she tried not to cry. “I just have to get out of here. I know that makes me a bad person, but what else can I do? I'll die if I have to stay here!”

Parvana remembered arguments between her
father and mother—her mother insisting they leave Afghanistan, her father insisting they stay. For the first time, Parvana wondered why her mother didn't just leave. In an instant, she answered her own question. She couldn't sneak away with four children to take care of.

“I just want to be an ordinary kid again,” Parvana said. “I want to sit in a classroom and go home and eat food that someone else has worked for. I want my father to be around. I just want a normal, boring life.”

“I don't think I could ever sit in a classroom again,” Shauzia said. “Not after all this.” She adjusted her tray of cigarettes. “You'll keep my secret?”

Parvana nodded.

“Do you want to come with me?” Shauzia asked. “We could look after each other.”

“I don't know.” She could leave Afghanistan, but could she leave her family? She didn't think so.

“I have a secret, too,” she said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the little gifts she'd received from the woman at the window. She told Shauzia where they had come from.

“Wow,” Shauzia said. “That's a real mystery.
I wonder who she could be. Maybe she's a princess!”

“Maybe we can save her!” Parvana said. She saw herself climbing up the wall, smashing the painted-over window with her bare fist and helping the princess down to the ground. The princess would be wearing silk and jewels. Parvana would swing her up onto the back of a fast horse, and they'd ride through Kabul in a cloud of dust.

“I'll need a fast horse,” she said.

“How about one of those?” Shauzia pointed to a herd of long-haired sheep snuffling through the garbage on the ground of the market.

Parvana laughed, and the girls went back to work.

At her mother's suggestion, Parvana had bought a few pounds of dried fruit and nuts. Nooria and Maryam put them into smaller bags, enough for a snack for one person. Parvana sold these from her blanket and her tray.

In the afternoon, she and Shauzia wandered around the market looking for customers. Sometimes they went to the bus depot, but they
had a lot of competition there. Many boys were trying to sell things. They would run right up to someone and stand in the person's way, saying, “Buy my gum! Buy my fruit! Buy my cigarettes!” Parvana and Shauzia were too shy for that. They preferred to wait for customers to notice them.

Parvana was tired. She wanted to sit in a classroom and be bored by a geography lesson. She wanted to be with her friends and talk about homework and games and what to do on school holidays. She didn't want to know any more about death or blood or pain.

The marketplace ceased to be interesting. She no longer laughed when a man got into an argument with a stubborn donkey. She was no longer interested in the snippets of conversation she heard from people strolling by. Everywhere, there were people who were hungry and sick. Women in burqas sat on the pavement and begged, their babies stretched across their laps.

And there was no end to it. This wasn't a summer vacation that would end and then life would get back to normal. This was normal, and Parvana was tired of it.

Summer had come to Kabul. Flowers pushed up out of the ground, not caring about the Taliban or land mines, and actually bloomed, just as they did in peace time.

Parvana's home, with its little window, grew very hot during the long June days, and the little ones were cranky at night with the heat. Even Maryam lost her good humor and whined along with the two youngest children. Parvana was glad to be able to leave in the morning.

Summer brought fruit into Kabul from the fertile valleys—those that had not been bombed into extinction. Parvana brought treats home for her family on the days she made a bit more money. They had peaches one week, plums the next.

The clear mountain passes brought traders from all over Afghanistan into Kabul. From her blanket in the marketplace, and when she walked around selling cigarettes with Shauzia, Parvana saw tribal peoples from Bamiyan, from the Registan Desert region near Kandahar, and from the Wakhan Corridor near China.

Sometimes these men would stop and buy dried fruit or cigarettes from her. Sometimes
they had something for her to read or write. She would always ask where they were from and what it was like there, so she could have something new to tell her family when she went home. Sometimes they told her about the weather. Sometimes they told of the beautiful mountains or the fields of opium poppies blooming into flower, or the orchards heavy with fruit. Sometimes they told her of the war, of battles they had seen and people they had lost. Parvana remembered it all to tell her family when she got home.

Through Mother's and Mrs. Weera's women's group, a secret little school was started. Nooria was the teacher. The Taliban would close down any school they discovered, so Nooria and Mrs. Weera were very careful. This school held only five girls, including Maryam. They were all around her age. They were taught in two different groups, never at the same time two days running. Sometimes the students came to Nooria, sometimes Nooria went to the students. Sometimes Parvana was her escort. Sometimes she carried a squirming Ali.

“He's getting too big to be carried around,”
Nooria said to Parvana on one of their noonday walks. Mother had allowed Nooria to leave Ali at home, to get a break from him. They only had Maryam with them, and she was no trouble.

“How are your students doing?”

“They can't learn much in a few hours a week,” Nooria replied. “And we don't have any books or school supplies. Still, I guess it's better than nothing.”

The little gifts from the window kept landing on Parvana's blanket every couple of weeks. Sometimes it was a piece of embroidery. Sometimes it was a piece of candy or a single bead.

It was as if the Window Woman was saying, “I'm still here,” in the only way she could. Parvana checked carefully around her blanket every time she went to leave the market, in case one of the gifts had rolled off.

One afternoon, she heard sounds coming from above her. A man was very angry. He was shouting at a women who was crying and screaming. Parvana heard thuds and more screams. Without thinking, she sprang to her feet and looked up at the window, but she
couldn't see anything through the painted glass.

“What goes on in a man's house is his own business,” a voice behind her said. She spun around to see a man holding out an envelope. “Forget about that and turn your mind to your own business. I have a letter for you to read.”

She was planning to tell her family about the whole incident that night, but she didn't get the chance. Instead, her family had something to tell her.

“You'll never guess,” her mother said. “Nooria's getting married.”

“But you've never even met him!” Parvana exclaimed to Nooria the next day at noon. It was the first chance they'd had to talk about it, just the two of them.

“Of course I've met him. His family and ours were neighbors for many years.”

“But that was when he was a boy. I thought you wanted to go back to school!”

“I will be going back to school,” Nooria said. “Didn't you listen to anything Mother was saying last night? I'll be living in Mazar-e-Sharif, in the north. The Taliban aren't in that part of Afghanistan. Girls can still go to school there. Both of his parents are educated. I can finish school, and they'll even send me to the university in Mazar.”

All of this was written in a letter that had arrived while Parvana was out at work. The women in the groom's family belonged to the same women's group as Mother. The letter had
passed from one member of the group to another until it finally reached Mother. Parvana had read the letter, but she still had a lot of questions.

“Do you really want to do this?”

Nooria nodded. “Look at my life here, Parvana. I hate living under the Taliban. I'm tired of looking after the little ones. My school classes happen so seldom, they're of almost no value. There's no future for me here. At least in Mazar I can go to school, walk the streets without having to wear a burqa, and get a job when I've completed school. Maybe in Mazar I can have some kind of life. Yes, I want to do this.”

There was a lot of discussion in the following few days about what would happen next. Parvana, out at work, had no voice in these discussions. She was merely informed of the plans when she got home in the evening.

“We'll go to Mazar for the wedding,” Mother announced. “We can all stay with your aunt while the wedding is prepared. Then Nooria will go to live with her new family. We will return to Kabul in October.”

“We can't leave Kabul!” Parvana exclaimed. “What about Father? What will happen if he
gets out of prison and we're not here? He won't know where to look for us!”

“I'll be here,” Mrs. Weera said. “I can tell your father where you are and look after him until you get back.”

“I'm not sending Nooria off to Mazar all by herself,” Mother said. “And since you are a child, you will come with us.”

“I'm not going,” Parvana insisted. She even stamped her feet.

“You will do as you're told,” Mother said. “All this running around wild in the streets has made you think you're above yourself.”

“I'm not going to Mazar!” Parvana repeated, stamping her feet again.

“Since your feet want to move around so much, you'd better take them out for a walk,” Mrs. Weera said. “You can fetch some water while you're at it.”

Parvana grabbed the bucket and got some satisfaction out of slamming the door behind her.

Parvana glowered for three days. Finally, Mother said, “You can take that awful frown off your face. We've decided to leave you here. Not because of your bad behavior. A child of
eleven has no business telling her mother what she will and will not do. We're leaving you here because it will be too difficult to explain your appearance. Your aunt will keep your secret, of course, but we can't count on everyone to be so careful. We can't take the chance of word about you getting back here.”

Although she was glad to remain in Kabul, Parvana found herself sulking that they weren't taking her with them. “I'm not satisfied with anything any more,” she told Shauzia the next day.

“Neither am I,” Shauzia said. “I used to think that if only I could sell things from a tray, I'd be happy, but I'm not happy at all. I make more money this way than I did as a tea boy, but it's not enough to make any real difference. We still go hungry. My family still argues all the time. Nothing is better.”

“What's the answer?”

“Maybe someone should drop a big bomb on the country and start again.”

“They've tried that,” Parvana said. “It only made things worse.”

One of the women in the local branch of the women's group was going to accompany
Parvana's family to the city of Mazar. Her husband would go with them as the official escort. If the Taliban asked, Mother would be the husband's sister, and Nooria, Maryam and Ali would be the nieces and nephews.

Nooria cleaned out the family cupboard one last time. Parvana watched her pack up her things. “If all goes well, we'll be in Mazar in a couple of days,” Nooria said.

“Are you scared?” Parvana asked. “It's a long journey.”

“I keep thinking of things that can go wrong, but Mother says everything will be fine.” They would be traveling together in the back of a truck. “As soon as I get out of Taliban territory, I'm going to throw off my burqa and tear it into a million pieces.”

Parvana went to the market the next day to buy the family some food for the journey. She wanted to buy Nooria a present, too. She wandered through the market looking at things for sale. She finally decided on a pen in a beaded case. Every time Nooria used it at university, and later when she became a real school teacher, she would think of Parvana.

“We'll be gone for most of the summer,”
Mother reminded Parvana the night before they left. “You'll be fine with Mrs. Weera. Do what she tells you, and don't give her any trouble.”